Zend Framework 1.11.0BETA1 Released

The Zend Framework team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the first beta release of Zend Framework 1.11.0. This release is the culmination of several months of effort by contributors and Zend Framework partners, and offers several key new features, including support for mobile devices and the first stable release of the SimpleCloud API.

This release is of BETA quality, and should be used for testing purposes only, not production. While the code has been well tested, we do expect there may be a few issues to resolve prior to a release candidate or general access release.

New Features in Zend Framework 1.11

Mobile Support

Zend Framework 1.11 marks the first release with explicit support for mobile devices, via the new component Zend_Http_UserAgent. This component was developed by Raphael Carles. Carles is CTO of Interakting, the digital agency of Business & Decision Group of France. Interakting employs 150 PHP professionals to build industrial PHP projects, and its clients include Canal +/Vivendi, BNP Paribas, Samsung France, Ministry of Education, Alapage (Orange), Orange Tunisia, and many others. As such, they have extensive experience in supporting mobile devices, and stepped forward to contribute to Zend Framework, which they leverage in their projects.

The component includes a “features” adapter mechanism that allows developers to tie into different backends for the purpose of discovering device capabilities. Currently, the only shipped adapter is for the WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) API.

Luca Passani, author and lead of the WURFL project, has provided an exemption to Zend Framework to provide a non-GPL adapter accessing the WURFL PHP API.

During ZendCon 2009, Zend announced a prototype of the SimpleCloud API.
This API was to provide hooks into cloud-based document storage, queue services, and file storage.

Zend Framework 1.11.0 markes the first official, stable release of Zend_Cloud, Zend Framework’s PHP version of the SimpleCloud API. Current support includes:

Document Services:

Amazon SimpleDB

Windows Azure’s Table Storage

Queue Services:

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Windows Azure’s Queue Service

All adapters supported by Zend_Queue:

Zend Platform JobQueue

Memcacheq

Relational Database

ActiveMQ

Storage Services:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Windows Azure’s Blog Storage

Nirvanix

Local filesystem

When using any of the SimpleCloud APIs, your code will be portable across the various adapters provided, allowing you to pick and choose your services, as well as try different services until you find one that suits your application or business needs. Additionally, if you find you need to code adapter-specific features, you can drop down to the specific adapter in order to do so.

More adapters will be arriving in the coming months, giving you even more options!

We thank Wil Sinclair and Stas Malyshev for their assistance in the initial releases of Zend_Cloud.

Security

Several classes in Zend Framework were patched to eliminate the potential for leaking timing information from the direct comparison of sensitive data such as plaintext passwords or cryptographic signatures to user input. These leaks arise from the normal process of comparing any two strings in PHP. The nature of the leaks is that strings are often compared byte by byte, with a negative result being returned early as soon as any set of non-matching bytes is detected. The more bytes that are equal (starting from the first byte) between both sides of the comparison, the longer it takes for a final result to be returned. Based on the time it takes to return a negative or positive result, it is possible that an attacker could, over many samples of requests, craft a string that compares positively to another secret string value known only to a target server simply by guessing the string one byte at a time and measuring each guess’ execution time. This server secret could be a plaintext password or the correct cryptographic signature of a request the attacker wants to execute, such as is used in several open protocols including OpenID and OAuth. This could obviously enable an attacker to gain sufficient information to perform a secondary attack such as masquerading as an authenticated user.

This form of attack is known as a Remote Timing Attack. Timing Attacks have been problematic in the past but to date have been very difficult to perform remotely over the internet due to the interference of network jitter which limits their effectiveness in resolving very small timing differences. While the internet still poses a challenge to performing successful Timing Attacks against a remote server, the increasing use of frameworks on local networks and in cloud computing, where network jitter may be significantly reduced, raises the distinct possibility that remote Timing Attacks will become feasible against ever smaller timing information leaks, such as those leaked when comparing any two strings. As a precaution, the applied changes implement a fixed time comparison for several classes which would be attractive targets in any potential remote Timing Attack. A fixed time comparison function does not leak any timing information useful to an attacker thus proactively preventing any future vulnerability to these forms of attack.

We thank Padraic Brady for his efforts in identifying and patching these vulnerabilities.

Dojo Support

Zend Framework’s default Dojo Toolkit version has been bumped to version 1.5.0.

SimpleDB Support

Zend Framework has provided support for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) platforms for several releases. Zend Framework 1.11.0 adds support for SimpleDB,

Amazon’s non-relational document storage database offering. Support is available for all SimpleDB operations via Zend_Service_Amazon_SimpleDb.

Zend Framework’s SimpleDB adapter was originally written by Wil Sinclair.

eBay Findings API Support

eBay has an extensive REST API, allowing developers to build applications interacting with their extensive data. Zend Framework 1.11.0 includes Zend_Service_Ebay_Findings, which provides complete support for the eBay Findings API. This API allows developers to query eBay for details on active auctions, using categories or keywords.

Zend_Service_Ebay was contributed by Renan de Lima and Ramon Henrique Ornelas.

New Configuration Formats

Zend_Config has been a quite popular component in Zend Framework, and has offerred adapters for PHP arrays, XML, and INI configuration files.
Zend Framework 1.11.0 now offers two additional configuration formats:
YAML and JSON.

Zend_Config_Yaml provides a very rudimentary YAML-parser that should work with most configuration formats. However, it also allows you to specify an alternate YAML parser if desired, allowing you to lever tools such as PECL’s ext/syck or Symfony’s YAML component, sfYaml.

Zend_Config_Json leverages the Zend_Json component, and by extension ext/json.

Both adapters have support for PHP constants, as well as provide the ability to write configuration files based on configuration objects.

Stas Malyshev created both adapters for Zend Framework; Zend_Config_Json also had assistance from Sudheer Satyanarayana.

URL Shortening

Zend_Service_ShortUrl was added for this release. The component provides a simple interface for use with most URL shortening services, defining simply the methods “shorten” and “unshorten”. Adapters for two services, http://jdem.cz and http://tinyurl.com, are provided with this release.

Zend_Service_ShortUrl was contributed by Martin Hujer.

Additional View Helpers

Several new view helpers are now exposed:

• Zend_View_Helper_UserAgent ties into the Zend_Http_UserAgent
component, detailed above. It gives you access to the UserAgent
instance, allowing you to query for the device and capabilities.
• Zend_View_Helper_TinySrc is an additional portion of Zend
Framework’s mobile offering for version 1.11.0. The helper ties
into the TinySrc API, allowing you to a) provide device-specific
image sizes and formats for your site, and b) offload generation of
those images to this third-party service. The helper creates img
tags pointing to the service, and provides options for specifying
adaptive sizing and formats.
• Zend_View_Helper_Gravatar ties into the Gravatar API, allowing you
to provide avatar images for registered users that utilize the
Gravatar service. This helper was contributed by Marcin Morawski.

Download it today!

We’d appreciate your feedback on this release — please download and test it, and let us know what issues you encounter.

Also, please join me in extending a hearty round of congratulations to all the contributors involved in this release!